Grosvenor Hill

Time tumbled together last night
in an image I can’t forget,
more real than real, as we rounded
a corner on our destined road trip
and were presented with a view
of the sleeping volcano where I grew up.

It was not like it is now,
ground down to a mere hill
with a few strange stones left buried
for ignorant geolinguists,
longing to get lost in the slow languages
of rocks and soil and earth herself.

It was vast and high and so alive,
covered in great trees that seemed
to fetch from sky the very meaning
of “green” and root it in this place,
looking not a thing like
the suburban slope that played
background to my boyhood.

And yet it was like it is now,
in a way only the logic of dreams
can decree, pointing to the seed
of a koan about home before home
and how the heart does not know time,
but can keep to the right key even
in the most furious riot of rhythm.

Then the birds which woke me:
red and yellow bishops bewitching
the woods with a simple song,
hammered home by three woodpeckers
sewing together radiant words
with an enchanting pitch of celebration,
of coming back to the same place
again and again, until it is not that
sleeping mountain which changes,
but the eye to which it grants vision.

Traces

Another history

Far deeper

Learn to love this life